These methods are for the technically inclined and with looser wallets.

But let’s look at something less technical and free: reducing the size of images used on your website.

For those using WordPress… You are in luck! You can download a free plugin – WP Smush that helps optimize all uploaded images automatically.

For those that are not using WordPress, you can use online tools like CompressJPEG to manually upload your images and compressing them! (You can upload and download the images in bulk.)

Some of you might ask me…

Is the compression substantial and is it even worth the time compressing the images?

Does the compression cause the images to look more grainy?

Let’s experiment with an image taken from the free stock photo site Pexels – It was a whopping 4608*3456 pixels at 5.84MB.

After uploading on CompressJPEG, the size reduced by 89% (-5.16MB)…

and no observable change in image quality, right?

(By the way, the image on the right is the compressed image.)

The interface of CompressJPEG… Look at those compression in file size. For this blog post alone, it has saved me about 1MB.

Images with larger file size (+2MB) will have a greater compression ratio of above 50%, medium images (~200KB) will be compressed by ~30%.

If you had 10 images (200KB) each on your website, you can help shave off about 1MB for the user, thus improving page load speed!

**Check – Remember to put alternate text for your images!**

2. Contents – Make it easy, relevant & informative!

The basics of SEO is creating contents – be it an article, infographic, video, photos or PDF, it must be easy to understand and relevant to your website.

If you create a half-hearted content, then it’s better not to post it! Write an article of high quality and sufficient length.

No ideas to create content? You can read up on relevant websites’ articles, take a bit from here and there and merge them in your own words.

Just make sure that you don’t Copy + Paste everything in! Put in some of your own ideas, experience, images, or whatever that can differentiate you from the fine line of plagiarism.

Quality

Before you post that article, have you done a spell check? Google is a school teacher – if there are too many misspelled words, or wrongly used grammar, it gives you a lower score than your classmates/competitors.

Fortunately, the Internet allows you to cheat in this school, with the use of tools like Grammarly which is available as both Chrome & Firefox extensions.

First of all, visitors coming to your website spend more time on your website. This means increased page visit duration and reduced bounce rate. (Visitors will more likely click on other links on your websites if you provided a solid high-quality content). Visitor’s dwell time on your web page is another often overlooked factor! Every single visit counts, therefore strive to satisfy your valuable visitors with contents!

Engage your followers and fans by posting your contents, promotions, sales, or any information relevant to your brand. Social shares are viral and will help push your website higher in the ranking.

HootSuite is a one-stop platform where you can manage all your social media accounts and publish your contents. (Scheduling & Analytics are useful too.)

Social media is a scary place because information spreads out like fire. If any of your friends likes your Facebook page, every friend of your friend sees that status on the Facebook wall. And hashtag is also another ingenious way to spread fire…

One step further, you can also use HootSuite to monitor mentions of your brand on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Being responsive to customers will definitely improve trust to your brand!

That’s all!

I believe that social media will be the fastest way one could improve their website/brand’s visibility – Fans & followers will be your marketer!

There are articles that advocate on H1 header tagging and meta tags and other techniques that were used in 2010. Although still applicable, but I believe that these 3 that I have written above play a much important role in the current SEO scene. (I did not use H1 tag for most of my pages.)

Although still applicable, but I believe that these 3 that I have written above play a much important role in the current SEO scene. (FYI, I did not use H1 tag for most of my pages. I did not bother with the meta tags too.)

Google is smart and has evolved to a massive thinking robot that does not base the ranking simply on meta tags & anchor texts.

Of course, keyword research & competitor analysis are still important if you want to measure and set a target for your SEO campaign. Leave these to the professionals!